Cover of the Rollin’ Stone

April 19th, 2009 Comments Off

(04-17) 16:38 PDT SAN FRANCISCO: Rolling Stone magazine has severed its last tenuous link to San Francisco, the city where Jann Wenner co-founded the irreverent biweekly 42 years ago to cover the psychedelic rock scene and counterculture movement flourishing in the region.

Aren’t we going to mark this with some sort of funereal gathering? Yeah, right. Like there’s anybody left to gather. Aikoanne, a few of her Deadhead friends, and me.

In truth, Rolling Stone fled its native city years ago. The company moved its headquarters to New York in 1977 and closed the last San Francisco editorial bureau in the early 1980s. On his way out of town, Wenner told The Chronicle that San Francisco was “a provincial backwater.”

What a snot. You can see how this led to . . .

“Jann Wenner got himself a jet and a home in the Hamptons. The world changed,”

The world didn’t change, Jann Wenner changed.

Okay, the world changed… but when the sense started to dribble out of Rolling Stone, when it lost it’s edge—and what rag wouldn’t, with it’s owner jetting to the fucking Hamptons—the world lost the famous nesting ground of HRH Hunter Thompson and a bevy of other fine writers, Tom Wolfe not least.

An early issue featured a spread of a drug bust at the Grateful Dead’s studio on Ashbury Street,

See? See? Who’s going to cover important events like this?

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